Black en Vogue

Client

Tuskegee University Department of Architecture

Project Type

Workshop

Audience

Academic

Project Completion

2018

Tuskegee University welcomed Designing in Color with open arms, riveting conversation, and profound thoughts. Students attended “Black en Vogue” with the kind of enthusiasm DCo organizers thrive upon.

“Black en Vogue” sought to elaborate on some of the thoughts started with the previous talk at the NOMA Chicago Conference, “For Us, By Us”. It combined the mind-expanding features of afrofuturism with the groundbreaking boldness of Floyd McKissick’s Soul City precedent to discuss new approaches to spatial justice.

The workshop segment asked the students to imagine a world where monetary wealth was no longer a factor. There were three key aspects to the thought experiment:

There was no socio-economic class system
Working to receive a paycheck had become a past idea
Institutional relationships, i.e. universities, banks, and healthcare, had been restructured

Working in small groups, students sought to program a spatially just world without wealth. The results were evocative, inventive, and filled with an afrofuturist optimism that would have made Y’Tasha Womack proud.